F. R 






IF I SHOULD MEET THE 
MASTER! 



" I will always observe, and obey, and do His will, and 
always call Him * Jesus, my Master.' '* 

— George Herbert. 



IM 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE 
MASTER! 



BY 

GEORGE THOMAS SMART 

Author of *' Studies in Conduct,^^ ** The Mystery of 
Peace;' " The Golden Bond " 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



JC^ 



Sss 



CopyrighU 1910 
By Luther H. Gary 



THE* PLIMPTON -PRESS 

[W'D'O] 
NORWOOD • MASS • U • S • A 



©CI,A2'?3428 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I On the Way to Find Him .... 1 



II Shall I Speak or Listen When I Meet 

Him . 

III Would He Be the Christ of Nature 

IV What Would He Say of Me 
V Is He Aware op Society 

VI What Does He Say of Himself 

VII Will He Show Me the Father 



8 
17 
26 
34 
44 
51 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE 
MASTER! 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE 
MASTER ! 



On the Way to Find Him 

IT has been hard to find you, O my 
Master! There are so many ways 
of missing you. Sometimes I do 
not see you because you are the sight, 
and often I do not know you because 
you are the eternal reason. To meet 
you is as difficult as to meet myself. 
You are the alter ego of every good 
man's life. 

You are so far away from me in Time. 
I become faint at heart as I think of 
the process of the suns since you walked 
in cloudless Syria. Two thousand 
years! who shall span them to-day, 
when even moments are become the 
stuff of life.^ It would need a Pharaoh 
who built to outlast dynasties to stretch 
his imagination over these twenty 
hundred years. Three score and ten 
generations of men have walked the 
dusty yesterdays since you went up to 
Jerusalem to begin a nobler race. You 
[1] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

are indeed enveloped in the ''pathos of 
distance" and I lose my way in these 
large circuits of Time. 

And the Book is peculiar — the liter- 
ature peculiar — that affirms your 
reality and identity. I am taught to 
esteem it as the Book of books, yet this 
elevation separates. It is difficult in 
height of rhetoric, confusing in its 
manifoldness, oppressive in its weight 
of personality, humiliating in its reve- 
lations of man's weakness. It is the 
most actual and the most impossible 
of all the records of men. It describes 
Vanity Fair and yet lives in a land of 
dreams. It is your book; and this is 
another wonder; for nowhere else does 
one great personality so knit together 
the records of a race. 

Is this predominance a dream, or is 
it a fact? Is it a surpassing loyalty of 
the evangelists, or an everlasting reality 
demonstrable by myself.^ When the 
men who companioned with you lay 
down, each in his several way, how you 
dealt with them, emphasizing in hu- 
man fashion their preferences in your 
character, I miss you again. Are you 
Matthew's Jesus or Mark's.^ Did Luke 
[2] 



ON THE WAY TO FIND HIM 

amplify too heroically? Did John phi- 
losophize? And Paul — did he appre- 
hend you in one tumultuous moment, 
catching only a glimpse of your mean- 
ings, or did he hit upon your ''secret'' 
— the eternal secret of your life? 

More warily still do I have to tread 
the road to find you in ecclesiastical 
life. The Church — your Church — 
has been overzealous to protect you, to 
defend you; and it has often hidden you 
in fastnesses whither few could come. 
I breathed an exotic air as I sought you 
in the closed gardens of the papacy; 
my spirit was oppressed, its flights 
denied. Sometimes I found no sign of 
you, but merely a simulacrum sitting 
in your place, nay climbing to a 
place you never sought, and dictating, 
yes, dictating, salvation to men, forcing 
them to keep a regimental step in 
belief and works. Then indeed I 
missed you, and so did others, — Blessed 
Francis for one, and Wycliffe, and 
Luther. 

Sometimes I lose you, my Master, 

in the wrecks of old civilizations 

flooded over your earthly life. The 

Jerusalem you walked lies five fath- 

[3] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

oms deep below the rubbish of to-day. 
The city you wept over yet asks the 
tears of men, for Rachel is still ravished 
of her children. The "glory that was 
Greece and the grandeur that was 
Rome " are the fables of history. Since 
the Greeks sought you at the feast, or 
Pilate questioned you, whole races have 
swept like torrents over your continent 
and the one adjacent. The memorials 
of any man's life must needs be cut 
deep if they last. And some of yours 
have disappeared forever. 

Moreover I fail to find you, my Mas- 
ter, because of the oppositions of race. 
You do not belong to my blood. My 
speech was an incoherent babble when 
you were a Voice crying through the 
quarters of the earth. My race was 
in the melting-pot when you were 
reckoning your ancestry from kings. 
My present attitude to life, exigently 
demanded by blood, situation, educa- 
tion, was not dreamed of when you 
were standing far above the crowd. 
You are an Oriental, and I am of the 
Occident. In crossing this estranging 
sea of race I often lose you. 

Thus you are a lonely and silent 
[4] 



ON THE WAY TO FIND HIM 

figure, my Master, in the crowded 
streets of to-day. Men say that they 
see you, and report what you desire, 
but the message is far from clear. The 
world is a shining and noisy place, and 
it is easy to forget your humility. 
Our gilded youth still drive along the 
Appian Way. We have Nebuchadnez- 
zars who build great cities, and Caesars 
who wait restless at the head of mighty 
armies. Brother demands of brother, 
nation of nation, that the inheritance 
be divided, so that the sea that you 
never saw is resonant with martial 
storms. Your philosophy of resigna- 
tion is a foreign language to most of my 
fellows to-day, O Master. I hear them 
say, ''I am of Nietzche and the Super- 
man," or ''I am of Ibsen and the real 
man," or "I stir the primal slime with 
Zola, or see all life as an infinite jest 
with Shaw." These men speak to me, 
my Master, and in my tongue; they 
live in my world to-day and profess to 
know its corners. And your voice 
seems distant and esoteric for the 
moment while these stertorous breath- 
ers dream awake. Forgive me, Jesus 
my Master, if I do not always find you, 

[5] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MAST ER! 

for the world is fuller of men than it 
has ever been before, and I lose you in 
the crowd. 

Ah! the fault is mine. The weakness 
is within. Ought not I to be ashamed 
of the tyranny of time when I am an 
immortal spirit .5^ Is not time only a 
comic category of my thinking.^ Is 
the literature that speaks of you so 
foreign, after all, since the Teuton 
spirit seized on its morality with a 
truer insight than any Semitic race has 
shown, and the Anglo-Saxon genius has 
worked over its phrases and persons 
till they are part of a deathless art.^^ 
Has not the Church, ''seated in hearing 
of a hundred streams," sailed some of 
them to the source, and has always 
— somewhere — kept you in mind.? 
Have the floods of overwashing civiliza- 
tions obliterated so much, or did not 
your spirit lay hold of the eternally 
valid in them and use it in morals, art, 
and logic until it expressed something 
of your mind.? As to the oppositions 
of race, what are they, my Master.? 
Is there not a larger family still than 
my own particular tribe and nation, 
one where the best life of all nations 
[6] 



ON THE WAY TO FIND HIM 

belongs equally to each? And may I 
not forget the noisy servitors of our 
present day by remembering the mes- 
sages of ''wise passiveness" or heroic 
trust uttered by more than one im- 
mortal singer of the world ''evermore 
about to be"? 

Ah! as I said before, the fault is 
within. But even there I find you. 
For in the quiet of the hour of medita- 
tion all that is best, all that is rarest, all 
that makes me wish to awaken to-mor- 
row with an inscrutable expectation 
of finding joy, is of you. My Master, 
I could not face to-morrow if you had 
not gone over its hours before me. It is 
the hope of meeting you in its dreariest 
moment that keeps me in heartiness, so 
that I can still discover some midsum- 
mer delights. 



[7] 



II 

Shall I Speak or Listen When I 
Meet Him 

MY Master, when I meet you, 
how shall I approach you? 
If I get together the momen- 
tary essence of all my best living, that 
will be poor enough. My worthiest 
self looks pale and ineffectual in the 
light of your searching gaze. I shrivel 
up; and yet within the dryness of my 
soul there is still something that lives 
for you. Deep calls to deep, and my 
deeps answer yours, so that, despite 
the horror of seeing myself shrink to a 
mere possibility, I can bear the heav- 
enly pain of your scrutiny, for you look 
to heal, and in your eyes I find some 
image of my future self. 

But shall I listen, or speak, when I 
meet you, my Master.^ I must needs 
listen to you, for words of graciousness 
fall from your mouth. Men used to 
be astonished at your speech, and the 
[8] 



SHALL I SPEAK OR LISTEN 

amazement is now become a habit. 
And I, who have a larger knowledge of 
what you said than any one in the 
wondering multitudes, surely must lis- 
ten when you speak. To your nearest 
familiar in the flesh your words were 
fragments; they all had to be resolved 
in the alembic of one personal mind; 
but to me they are several in emphasis 
and mutually explanatory up to a cer- 
tain degree. Yes, — up to a certain 
degree; — for at the most your words 
are very few. You neither strive nor 
cry; you answer not again; you do not 
seek your own. You are the great 
Silent One. Yet what you do not say 
is also necessary to me. 

Indeed I must listen to you, but more 
still I must speak. It is for this I 
sought you. I know the words you 
uttered to other individual souls; I 
also know those that fit the need of 
''man in widest commonalty spread"; 
but I long for personal assurances for 
myself. You spoke home to your day, 
I need your word for mine. 

I must speak — just as I must pray; 
and all men must pray, for prayer has 
ever been more voluminous than revela- 
[9] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

tion. The voice of man calling upon 
God has been a most pertinacious lit- 
any. So I shall have much to say to 
you, my Master, and all the more 
because I know so little. You do not 
need to speak to me for you are near 
to me; but I have need to speak to 
you because I am so far away. 

Thus let me speak to you concerning 
To-day, — let me try my meanings by 
the side of yours; for to-day is busy 
with me, mischievous even, and always 
big with mystery. 

As to Yesterday, I can manage that 
better. Old problems do not disquiet 
me. I can almost smile at the heavy 
miseries of former days and, blind as 
I am, can easily thread my way through 
a past that lets in no new thing or per- 
son. Looking backward I can be com- 
placent in strange company; I am 
hardly moved by personal distress, or 
the clash of cities, or the fall of empires. 
I see all as a dream. And it is ended. 
For a moment I am interested, perhaps 
uneasy, perhaps amused; but after- 
wards I awake. 

And what an awakening! Then in- 
deed I am a troubled sleeper in the cool 
[10] 



SHALL I SPEAK OR LISTEN 

inexorable dawn. Fierce voices call 
me to rise to the double labor of gather- 
ing the fruits and sowing the seed. I 
can handle the harvest of other days 
more competently, and to-day as the 
commentary on yesterday is not a hard 
matter; but to-day as the seed-field of 
to-morrow is the test of humanity. 
To-day is already to-morrow because 
it is unavoidable, seminal, and infinite. 
The element of newness is what troubles 
me. I can meet the old requirements, 
the old temptations (has it not been 
affirmed that there are only thirty-six 
tragic situations.^); but how am I to 
meet evil when it keeps changing its 
disguise.^ It is Satan in one age, the 
devil in another, Mephistopheles in 
another, but what in mine.^ Job is an 
example to me; but it is not Satan who 
comes. I do not know who may come. 
And it may even chance to be Lilith 
changed to Circe, or Circe to Helen, or 
Helen to — ah, if I only knew! 

I must speak, too, of the new morali- 
ties. Your moralities have the mark 
of spirituality, they support the deeper 
foundations or mark out the archi- 
tecture of the flinty ribs of life, and I 
[11] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

am brought up to them and admire, 
nay, reverence their spring and thrust, 
and I perceive that Hke Gothic piers 
they carry the weight of the entire 
building. But, my Master, you know 
my humanity and my subjection to 
immediate ornament, the convention, 
the passing show. And so, while fall- 
ing back on your probing morals when 
I see deeply, I am yet confused because 
the envisaging of your insight is not 
always the envisaging of to-day. 

Yes, my Master, there are new mo- 
ralities growing out of new situations 
and new instruments of living. The 
moral code is never completed. It ever 
grows inward and towards the heart. 
Thus you gave to Caesar what belonged 
to him; but I am asked to declare what 
it is that he can call his own. You gave 
away all that you had, but I have wife 
and children and a ring of poor relations 
pressing upon my subsistence. I speak 
with you about these daily matters 
for they come into the common dis- 
course of men. 

And I am not only perplexed with 
the applications of the moral intention. 
The intention itself comes into question. 
[1^] 



SHALL I SPEAK OR LISTEN 

It is not the question as to how many 
virtues there are, — four cardinal vir- 
tues or forty, — nor is it a question as 
to what is the greatest good; but it is 
the question, Is there One Eternal 
Goodness, and does that Goodness 
finally prevail? There are those who 
exhort a swifter change in values, 
affirming that all are social and only 
worthy as they minister to the great- 
est number. Others say that all the 
standards I have accepted are neither 
instinctive modesties of the soul, nor 
yet deliverances from heaven, but a 
social contract agreed upon to preserve 
common interests. Others still affirm 
that all standards are outgrown and 
that yours are only suitable for a 
slave-morality. And yet again some 
proclaim your standards and profess to 
apply them, both as individuals and as 
nations, all the time seeking their own 
avaricious ends. Is there One Good- 
ness, my Master.^ Are morals ex- 
changeable.^ Is the moral life a social 
contract merely.'^ Is humility a slave 
virtue.^ Is the future only for the 
''fittest," and if so, who are they.^ Is 
the Christ man to be a Superman? Or 
[13] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

is man as a whole a determined mechan- 
ism playing back to the cosmic energies 
merely the physical and instinctive 
tune? 

It all means this, my Master, and 
never more clearly than when I speak 
with you: What are the goals of men, 
and what are mine? 

Is it true that they are altogether 
social, as some assert? I am told that 
I am a social product, that I was born 
of the will of society, that my Self is 
only a name for a congeries of relations 
reaching out at last to the most dis- 
tant man; that all the continents fur- 
nished me forth and all sustain me; 
that history throbs in my blood, and all 
creation speaks in me, and since I am 
not individual but social, I am to judge 
everything from this point of view. 
But I grow cold, — indifferent even. 
I cannot embrace the Pleiades; I can- 
not love the unknown ''man and 
brother"; I cannot warm to a neutral 
''society." I despise the mob. I 
would fly away and be at peace with a 
few familiars. Is this wrong? 

On the other hand, I am told that 
society is an idolatry, the creation of 
[14] 



SHALL I SPEAK OR LISTEN 

men who fatten the race in order to feed 
on it. I am told that though my 
Hfe was not willed by me, ever since my 
birth I have been demanding ''my own 
way." As a child I had a ''will/' as a 
man I have an inviolable self. As a 
matter of fact, society gets little of me. 
I pay it a fraction of my fruits and let 
it go. I give it a word or two and 
evade its curious question. I only 
think of it when, like a sick child, it 
cries too loud. Essentially I am alone. 
I have never told any one what I 
am and what I mean. I never can. 
When I die the world will get along, for 
I am so private and individual I shall 
never be missed. All, then, that I can 
do is to deepen my own experience and 
brim up my own delights. 

What say you, my Master.? Are you 
a ruler and divider between society and 
the self.? On better thought I cry Nay, 
and Nay, — I do not ask for a precise 
answer. I do not mean to quibble. I 
despise moral pedantry. I am human, 
and because I am a man you will leave 
me to work out the answer for myself. 

Yet I shall not be alone. You will 
be with me. When you spoke to my 
[15] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

far-off elders you used parables and 
often the parable needed explaining. 
It meant so many deep things. But 
it always made men more equal to their 
work. Is not your whole life become a 
parable to us of a later day, equally full 
of meaning and multitude, equally 
verging to the infinite with suggestion, 
equally, nay overpoweringly, girding 
men for their tasks .^ As I companion 
with you I find that this world is a 
storehouse of surprise, where God even 
deigns to play with men, and lays out 
life so magnanimously that they often 
lose the way. But there are moments 
when a vertical shaft of light lies over 
all the unknown land, and for an in- 
stant divination comes, and I am for- 
ever made nobler both to suffer and to 
rejoice. And these moments come 
while I speak with you. 



[16] 



Ill 

Would He Be the Christ of 
Nature 

WHEN you prayed for your 
disciples, my Master, you 
did not ask that they should 
be taken from the world; you asked 
that they might be kept from the evil 
that is in the world. This is what I 
ask to-day. 

I do not think that you mean me to 
leave the world, though I often sound 
but a dim and perilous way in it; for 
you, rejecting the ascetic practise, lived 
in it, and found it to be the world of 
God, and not the devil. I love the 
world. It stings me with delight as I 
watch its natural beauty. And though 
I am often ashamed to be a man, as I 
look upon the derelict members of my 
race, I am still oftener ashamed to be 
so poor a creature myself when brought 
face to face with human greatness. 
History and biography give me a double 
[17] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

blush, — that men are such mis- 
chievous creatures, Httle better than a 
kind of vermin, as Bacon said, — and 
that they are so noble. You, my Mas- 
ter, are in both history and biography, 
and the race should be measured in 
height as well as in depth. 

Ah! my Master, is this love of the 
world ill.'^ You loved the beauty of the 
lily, the lush greenness of the grass 
before it was cast into the oven, the 
birds in the mustard-branches, the 
children playing in the market-place, 
the men and women about their daily 
tasks. You called the fishermen to 
you, and welcomed Nathanael, and also 
saw the better part of the Sycharene. 
You loved the world. 

My world, however, is more con- 
fusing than yours, my Master. The 
magnitude of it distresses me. I may 
chance to love its poorer parts even 
with the best. I need to be brave to 
love it wisely. 

How large it is compared with yours ! 
I suppose you never walked the shores 
of the Great Sea; but to me the Great 
Sea is only a little inlet, for I have sailed 
the oceans. You trod the streets of 
[18] 



CHRIST OF NATURE 

one metropolis, I have lived in several. 
You touched a few of the powers of 
nature, but my fellows have harnessed 
many for me. Daily I am brought 
close to the geologic ages. Geography 
is a science that I have only begun in 
an intensive way, though I roam over a 
world quadruple the size of yours. 
Outside of your Syria there were the 
fames of a few other nations and the 
rest was silence; but for me, outside of 
my own land there are many others and 
all are known. I throb to the stir of 
twenty states; my life is cut out for me 
in a dozen countries, — ''The world is 
too much with us late and soon." My 
great need is to keep my own soul; for 
the distant east and west, north and 
south, knock at my door momently. 
If you began your ministry now, would 
you send your disciples to all the world, 
or would you send them to themselves.^ 
I surmise that you would often call 
them to yourself! 

Perhaps I am too insistent on the 
fact of the world; yet I cannot help it 
if I am honest with my day and my own 
heart; for the interests of to-day are 
more cosmic than ever before, and I am 
[19] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

a child of to-day. Only a hundred 
years of serious interest in the cosmic 
order, but how much has been shown 
in this time! Poets, who of all men 
should have been alive to it, until a 
hundred years ago tempered their ad- 
miration with fear. To-day they only 
love. 

But the more serious-minded learn. 
Perhaps they are too serious, for some- 
times they speak as though even you 
had nothing for them, my Master, be- 
cause you did not deliver cosmic knowl- 
edge to men. They ask whether you 
knew, or cared to tell, how little Moses 
knew; why you did not declare the 
origins and processes of nature? 
''Why did you acquiesce in so childish 
a cosmology?" they inquire. 

This indeed once troubled me. Then 
I saw that nature is only to be explained 
through humanity, for human pur- 
poses; and that the pressing matter is 
to see that men treat it wisely, using 
and not abusing it. Science, indeed, 
so far as morality is concerned, is a 
changing play of the intellect, disclosing 
new wonders of creation and new in- 
struments for men to use; but in all 
[20] 



CHRIST OF NATURE 

ages men have the option of moral 
greatness whatever may be the for- 
mulas of natural law they put together. 
Your formulas are not mine but, oh, 
that my way of living up to what I 
know were level with yours ! 

One thing indeed grows out of the 
contemporary knowledge, my Master, 
namely the vast widening of your mis- 
sion, and the retroactive love of God. 
In those long twilight ages unnum- 
bered creatures lived and died. Were 
they without God, and without hope, 
because you came so late? I trow not. 
I am bound to believe that the over- 
flowing love of the Father, made clear 
in you, must have had some surplus for 
others. The divine Spirit you represent 
must have lodged with these early men; 
or else it could not be divine. 

Thus, my Master, I rest another 
case that troubles me, the trouble 
of the stars, trouble that seems far- 
fetched as the light that comes from the 
midnight sky. Yet I cannot forbear. 
If those worlds are like to ours and 
worthy of God, they surely have or had 
some conscious life. Did you visit them; 
or did some other ministry of the 
[21] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

divine? My concern is not that I 
should communicate with Mars, but 
that God should. Yet, as I say, I rest 
my case on human history; for God 
visited man and this present world, 
and what is man that he should be 
mindful of him? 

I never enter upon these large mat- 
ters, my Master, without at last coming 
upon a great shadow, in whose presence 
I grow disquieted. I find law in the 
universe more widely than the men of 
your day; but I also find a deeper pain, 
a stranger capriciousness. The crea- 
tive energy seems to fail so often when 
it touches the individual, though it 
succeeds with the type. Death has 
been prodigal as well as life; pain as 
well as delight. And I am driven to 
feel for the individual and to forget the 
type. Yes, my Master, even you 
summed up this fact as none other. 
What do you say to this, — Does God 
forsake his creatures in their hour of 
agony, or does he receive their spirits? 
In short, do we suffer alone, or does he 
suffer with us? Ah, if only the cosmic 
struggle is to be finally worked out as 
a spiritual victory; but for it to end thus 
[ 22 ] 



CHRIST OF NATURE 

God must be more than an observer. 
He must be in the very thick of it, 
mean it to be a struggle, and yet mean 
final victory too. My Master, I stop 
my mouth with dust, for you entered 
the struggle and were worsted, and you 
were the Only Begotten, and you did 
the Father's will. Then I can enter it 
too. 

A more immediate question, my 
Master, is. What are the rights and 
duties of man towards the natural 
world he lives in.^ He seems to be 
within his privilege as he cuts the grass 
and casts it into the oven; for grass will 
grow again, and the cattle upon the hills 
need provender. But he cuts down 
the forests, and the rain washes the 
face of the earth till it shines with a 
stony smile, and no more forests 
glorify Lebanon, no more vintages 
climb the mountain slopes. Or he digs 
deep into the earth and rifles the treas- 
ure of ages. What are his rights and 
duties here? He seems to sin against 
God in despoiling the earth of its 
beauty; he seems to sin against pos- 
terity by robbing it of garnered wealth, 
yet he must live. Oh, that he might 
[23] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

live as you lived, that he might move 
forward from fear to utility and from 
utility to reverence. I hear a word 
of yours, imprisoned in monastic ar- 
chives until yesterday, that speaks to 
my conscience: '' Cleave the wood and I 
am there, split the stone and I am 
there." I do not wonder that Francis 
of Assisi called fire ''Brother Fire." 
He, at least, in a naughty world, was a 
candle shining clear. 

And this world's end, my Master, 
what of it.^ One man claims you as his 
warrant when he conceives the end of 
the world in time. He says the time is 
not far away. He pictures your de- 
scent from the clouds as the painter of 
the Sistine drew it. He thinks of you 
as sifting the wheat and burning the 
chaff. To be just to him he does not 
care about the world, but he cares about 
the men in it, hence he persuades them 
to flee from the wrath to come. So 
inevitable is this apocalyptic state of 
mind for men that even men of science 
sometimes speak of devolution as the end 
of evolution. But this surely is not 
your conception, my Master. If you 
came quietly at first, and come quiet]' 
[24] 



CHRIST OF NATURE 

now, why not always? And would 
an order smitten out of disorder, or 
imposed imperially on a refractory 
world, remain order very long? His- 
tory and morals affirm this rather to be 
the last dread disorder. 

Other men, of whom I am one, my 
Master, think of the end of the world 
in terms of purpose. I do not ask when 
it shall end, but I do ask what it should 
grow to. I live in futurity; I can 
see ''improvements" to be made. I 
feel the subtle pressure of posterity, 
of nations yet to be, of a coming race 
of whom my Master is the first begot- 
ten. And I can trust the world to 
them, for you will be their light as you 
have been mine. 

Yes, my Master, you are the cosmic 
Christ. I do not know whether you 
made the world or not, I do not care, 
but I do know that the other creation, 
which is explanation, is absolutely 
yours. For I only understand my 
relation to universal life both in duty 
and in privilege, as I keep close to your 
universal moralities, and am filled by 
the dynamic of your spiritual insight. 

[25] 



IV 

What Would He Say of Me 

AS I ponder the appeal you made 
to the early disciples, O Mas- 
ter, I feel the imperative of 
your speech and the unity of the re- 
sponse. I see you meeting the Self of 
man, and I perceive that you win, 
while the human self loses, to find a 
larger self, more sensitive and compli- 
cated, but also more splendid. 

Yet when I meet you, my Master, 
though aware of the royalty of your 
life and the directness of your voice, 
I do not feel that I can answer quite as 
unreservedly as the men of a simpler 
age. You call with the old love; but 
I listen with the new adjuncts. 

And those adjuncts reach out far and 
penetrate deep. For I am not a simple 
Self. I see and know myself as com- 
pounded of other times; and even 
though I would willingly forget this 
usurpation of history for a moment, I 
[26] 



WHAT WOULD HE SAY OF ME 

cannot. I also reckon myself a man of 
to-day with a place in the scheme of 
nature and society largely determined 
for me, with activities also preordained. 
At the same time I know myself as a 
set of motives and instincts and vagrant 
longings, so that the innermost chamber 
of my heart is often a cage where the 
primal energies strive for the mastery. 
I should like to enter into the happy 
irresponsibility of the patriarchs as they 
chose by lot whither they should walk. 
I should be glad to live for a time in 
that other age when immediately on the 
word of invitation men left their nets 
and followed you. But I have come to 
another style of life, no longer simple, 
no longer sudden in its shifts of human 
destiny. A place once vacated can 
hardly be found again. If I should 
outwardly respond to the noblest call 
too quickly, I might drag with me some 
who were unwilling to come. This 
means that I touch a critical age. 
Your age was captious, suggesting un- 
reasonable options; but mine is critical 
and offers alternatives that look to be 
rational. The emphasis has indeed 
changed. With me it is not always 
[27] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

light struggling against darkness, but 
a veiled sky with esthetic delights 
against the clear precision of noonday. 
It is the better against the best. 

Even so, I cannot escape the earlier, 
nay, the aboriginal temptations. I have 
the perennial threefold difficulty that 
fronts every generation, though with 
vastly differing pressure on the several 
parts according to the man and the age. 

One of these temptations is that of 
the flesh, for I am of the same tissue 
with my fellows. We do not now speak 
so openly as the elders, who had stouter 
hearts and stronger appetites than we 
admit to-day, and yet the fact remains. 
In the noblest men there are primal 
needs and passions that have much to 
do with the continuance of the race and 
the structure of society. They also 
have much to do with its miseries. Am 
I to be ascetic and deny the body en- 
tirely, calling it with Francis, ''Brother 
Ass ''? Am I to refrain because another 
misadventures in his using of a rare and 
delicate instrument .^^ O my Master, 
there are earthly harvest-fields that 
spread before me a beauty provocative 
of hunger, vintages that set hot and 
[28] 



WHAT WOULD HE SAY OF ME 

rebellious blood afire, and personal 
beauty that in all ages has had a fierce 
and arduous history. These are in 
truth desperate seas on which men 
roam; but should they rot upon the 
shore afraid to venture? Is my stum- 
bling, even foundering, worse than the 
pallid fear that makes the ascetic 
entirely forego permissible pleasures? 
Surely you have known the glad physi- 
cal exhilaration of wind and weather 
on the mountain-side; and I gather 
that you did not entirely reject the 
goods of the harvest, for you spoke of 
the fruits and the wine. But that 
other temptation, — the one that over- 
came David, and spoiled many a royal 
dynasty, that launched the ships of 
Troy, and even drove cool scholastics 
like Abelard on the rocks, — the fatal 
gift of beauty, — do you quite under- 
stand what serious business my fellows 
and I are engaged in? I think you do, 
for while you carried the Mosaic morals 
to a more probing depth than any 
earlier commentator, your spirit in the 
heart of some unknown disciple inter- 
polated a lovely parable of mercy in the 
Gospel of John. 

[29] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

As to the second difficulty, my Mas- 
ter, you know it as certainly as I, 
though the temptation has new matter 
to-day. This temptation is the rational 
one. I never cease to thank you, my 
Master, that you were the liberator of 
men's minds; that you looked undis- 
mayed upon the most forbidding object; 
that you refused to be cajoled or com- 
pelled into accepting venerable opin- 
ions. You, if any one, fought for mental 
freedom; you insisted on seeking the 
thing-in-itself in a deeper way than 
post-Kantian metaphysics sought it. 
My blood indeed stirs as I read your 
dissection of the solemn folly proposed 
by the moral tyrants of your day. 

And I need this exhilaration. For 
when I try to see the thing as it is, — 
and above all, yourself as you are, — 
those of my contemporaries who are 
lineal descendants of the scribes often 
affirm that you are against me, and that 
I am irreverent to you in seeking out 
the reality and meaning of things. 
Shall I go with the crowd, side with 
the majority, ally myself with the 
noisily orthodox, delight in the slow 
stupefactions of middle life, or shall 
[30] 



WHAT WOULD HE SAY OF ME 

I keep ''incorrigibly young"? Some- 
times, when looking for you alone and 
in little frequented places, overcome by 
the awful sense of isolation, I have won- 
dered whether I should not go with the 
multitude who keep religion as a holi- 
day and traverse the wide and sunny 
streets; but then I have suspected 
that they did not find you, and I must 
find you, my Master; indeed I do, 
while I tell you of the hot-footed follow- 
ers of my way. In all my seeking I 
would do you no irreverence, O Master, 
for you are heart of my heart, and 
reason of my reason, the Word made 
flesh. Yet I would turn the flesh again 
into the eternal Word. In all my 
reasoning keep me in elemental Life! 
Once more, my Master, I am a man 
of faith. I live by faith, as all men do> 
and not by sight. I cannot see a day 
before me. At a mile distance the 
object is blurred. To-morrow I do not 
see at all, yesterday I think I see, but 
often my vision needs revising. It 
takes faith to live, to work, to pray, to 
hope, — to have faith. This present 
search of mine was begotten in faith. 
If it shall end in finding a more blessed 
[31] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

life, the finding must be planted again 
in faith. 

But what am I to believe, my Mas- 
ter? Some have said I must accept the 
slow deposit of earlier generations lat- 
terly become hardened into dogmas; 
others have said I must be loyal to doc- 
trines delivered to the saints out of 
the Scriptures. I can accept neither. 
Just as my life is an uncharted way, 
never traversed by another, so my doc- 
trines, if they are vitally mine, must be 
found by myself. Am I right, or wrong, 
when I feel that I can only have faith 
in life, and that though life throws off 
doctrines as explanations, life is the 
important thing .^^ And in like manner, 
is it not true that life, to be believed in, 
need not be talked about so much as 
lived .5^ 

You see, my Master, where I have 
come. I come to 2/02/ ! For I hear you 
saying, ''I came that they may have 
life, and may have it abundantly.'' 
I also hear you say: "Life comes 
quietly, unexpectedly, mysteriously. 
It is long before it can give an account 
of itself, and its doctrines need revi- 
sion not only in each age, but by each 
[32] 



WHAT WOULD HE SAY OF ME 

person. The test of it is that it creates 
more Hfe. Faith is only faith when it 
works, — whatever the works may need 
to be, — sometimes indeed the greatest 
work is to revive itself, and always 
it lives when its life is the fount and 
reason for other life." Surely, my 
Master, it must be this energy of things 
that shall correlate all my reasoning, 
and no less keep in subjection the sins 
of the flesh! 



[33] 



Is He Aware of Society 

AH, my Master, the Self that 
appears so simple, as long as I 
do not look at it but blindly 
follow its instinctive demands, turns out 
to be vastly complex. In my deep- 
est interior motion I touch the extrem- 
est borders of humanity. I do not 
live, I do not die, to myself. 

I cannot help this complication, my 
Master; for society to-day is neither as 
exclusive nor invertebrate as it was in 
your day, when the rigid aristocracy of 
morals spoke too much, and the flowing 
tide of humanity spoke not at all. You 
were the first ''advocate of the absent'' 
in this newer age as you uttered the 
wordless longings of men. 

But to-day the wordless masses no 
longer exist. They have their cham- 
pions, their philanthropists, their phil- 
osophers, who are engaged in putting 
their case to the other half of the world, 
[34] 



IS HE AWARE OF SOCIETY 

and often sowing in them a bitter and 
vain discontent. There are many 
friends of men to-day self -proposed, and 
perhaps self-seeking. How can I for- 
get society when it shouts at me with 
the voice of Bashan.?^ I am daily re- 
minded of my identity with men, and 
my duty to them, by these prophets of 
the present time. 

What is more, my Master, the multi- 
tudes have now found a voice them- 
selves. The music of humanity is no 
longer still or sad; it is noisy and im- 
perious, as the shouts of an army with 
banners. Society now demands from 
me a reason for payment, a reason for 
action, nay, a reason for existence. 
Formerly it charged headlong only upon 
thrones; now it charges upon me as an 
individual. It asks, "Why standest 
thou here.f^" The world no longer ad- 
mits that it owes me a living; it says 
that I owe it a reason. And I cannot 
escape its scrutiny. It preaches at 
me on the public streets from impro- 
vised pulpits; it contemptuously shouts 
down my academic sense in the daily 
press. It pushes brutally aside the 
sense of fineness, of distinction, of the 
[35] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

enlarging reverences of former times. 
It is too earnest for its ''rights," too 
insistent on its ''wages" to care for me. 
I cannot dig, and so it scorns me; I 
cannot reap, and so it counts me a 
parasite. It refuses to consider the 
goods that I try to deal in. 

Should I then, my Master, throw up 
my place and gains, and join society in 
seeking I know not what.^ Sometimes 
the vision of yourself overcomes me, — 
you, my Master, who had no place, no 
reward; sometimes the story of the 
Blessed Francis speaks to me, and I 
would go forth again as he did and owe 
no man anything but love. But would 
society accept me if I came thus empty- 
handed.^ And what right have I to 
tear the kindly web of relations that 
has been woven about me? I did not 
seek my present place; no one seeks 
his actually present condition, he would 
always have it better, freer, more to his 
ideal pattern, and yet I am here, and 
powerless to move. To step out, as 
society asks, would be a treachery 
against society. Society does not know 
itself, — its own history and longings. 
I sometimes get a momentary glimpse 
[36] 



IS HE AWARE OF SOCIETY 

of its first building; I perceive how 
painful is the discipline that keeps it 
together; and I know that it is far from 
a concluded good. I am also sure that 
society often becomes blindly selfish 
in its extreme demands. I cannot give 
all, — at least I cannot give it in the 
way that society asks. 

Am I not right, my Master.? Did 
you not flee from the multitudes into 
desert places; did you not cross the 
little sea to escape importunity; did 
you not pass through the midst of the 
crowd.? Did you always do and say 
what society demanded.? Did you give 
to society the last residual throb of 
yourself.? 

If you did, my Master, you were not 
the transcendent one I have believed 
you. Infinity, personality, surely never 
can give itself entirely away! So I 
answer back the demand of society by 
pointing to you who gave more than 
society asked but in another way. You 
did not do what some men asked. You 
did not tell what others wished to hear. 

Nor have I, nor shall I; for I know 
in my largest moments that personality 
is the choicest thing, and not produc- 
[37] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

tivity. My aider is not so necessary 
to me as my abettor. My paramount 
duty is the deepening of the springs of 
my own life so that out of these refresh- 
ing may come. I see that in former 
times the most needed men were the 
useless men, — men that society re- 
jected, — and perhaps even I, useless as 
I know myself to be, am yet needed by 
my age after all. 

I think I see, my Master, how you 
would deal with these high demands of 
society. I believe you would be less 
sharp with these conclusions than you 
were with the dull proposals of the 
Pharisees. I am sure you would be 
kind as you guided the stumbling 
thoughts of men. But you would win 
men by a love that withheld as well as 
gave; you would say that as for pro- 
duction there is also the bread of wis- 
dom; and that so much talk about 
reward argued little joy in labor and 
little in life. For you tell me that each 
day is to be a place of delight, and that 
abundant life, the joy of living, is a 
necessary and real good for any man or 
society worthy of the name. 

Yet I am troubled at times about my 
[38] 



IS HE AWARE OF SOCIETY 

payment. Deep in my heart I ask the 
reason why I have so much and others 
so httle. I wondered yesterday when 
a poor woman thought my dwelHng 
spacious, though humble enough, and 
my way of Hving beyond her furthest 
dream. I said to myself, and truly, 
that I had foregone delights to live 
laborious days in youth; that I had 
even known hunger and thirst so that 
I might eat of the fruit of the tree of 
knowledge, while she had been the 
sport of circumstance, marrying early, 
and ever since supporting a numerous 
family and a weak Debility whom she 
called Husband. But even then, sup- 
pose ambition spurred me and not her, 
how came my entrance into a social 
region charged with these dynamic pow- 
ers, and hers into one so weakening.? 
At the end of my questioning I 
always come upon this, that the "start" 
of my life was not my own but a free 
gift, freighted with more goods than 
some of my fellows have, or can have. 
But what shall I do with this surplus 
payment .5^ Has society a right to stand 
at my door and dun me for it.^^ Ought 
I to pay it all back.? 
[39] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

After all I have very little of it. 
Every decent man gets little but sus- 
tenance and a few esthetic and other 
joys that make none the poorer for his 
having, but the world far richer. I 
spend less on myself than the clerk or 
laborer. I clothe myself better, but 
also more cheaply than the negro porter 
who keeps the apartment. I watch the 
spending of money more closely than 
he; for I have a sense of responsibility 
that stands over me demanding the 
accounting of every penny. I do not 
take credit for this; I do not justify 
myself; I am only trying to see my way. 
Though society does not know it, I am 
denied more rigorously than the de- 
mander itself; for I want the rare and 
difficult things, and these are become 
daily necessities. ''Give me this day 
my daily book," is a harder prayer to 
achieve than if it were daily bread. 
When I follow you, my Master, it is 
dignity, largeness, beauty, knowledge, 
worship that I strive after, and these 
require instruments neither cheap nor 
common in the day I live in. 

In one thing I admit extravagance. 
Education takes a large part of my in- 
[40] 



IS HE AWARE OF SOCIETY 

come and soon will take more than I 
receive. Should I educate my own 
thus expensively, or spread the worth 
over society? Could not my children 
cut down their style and equipage so 
that others might have a chance? But 
the question arises, Is it wise to put a 
youth accustomed to some dignity 
upon a bare subsistence? Would his 
after-life be better or worse for himself 
and society? My Master, I do not 
know. But I seem obliged by the 
noblest examples and emotions to care 
for mine own else I were worse than a 
barbarian. And though I, standing 
towards youth in the place of Provi- 
dence, exact a daily denial, I still lean to 
mercy and liberality. 

Sometimes when pressed too brutally, 
and beaten with economic weapons too 
hardly, I turn demander, and facing 
society say that my way is not an easy 
one to follow. My place, my position, 
has its own hardships. Often indeed do 
I long for some simple village dwelling 
with no ''conveniences,'' and also no 
social exactions. Dear to me would 
be the wide maple-shaded street, the 
unaffected neighborly interest, the more 
[41] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

than sabbath stillness of an unambi- 
tious life. But if I chose thus I 
should be a heavier burden on my 
fellows. I cannot, I cannot! My place 
is mine and none other's. My home 
has ever something of the prison. 
My freest flight must needs have a 
return. 

What then, my Master.^ Is it not 
this, that life never can be settled out of 
hand, nor can the problem of society 
be answered at a stroke.^ I must daily 
smooth the roughness, daily try to 
answer the Sphinx, daily thread my way 
through the briers. If I could smite 
society and the self into a perfect and 
immovable equilibrium, would it still 
be life, or would it be death .^^ Life 
itself, society, with the contingent is- 
sues daily growing out of them, are my 
disciplines. My cross is one that I lift 
day by day. If I should fly to the 
uttermost ends of the earth society 
would be there to face me, for I am 
society myself; if I should try to lose 
my own individuality in the greatest 
crowd, again I could not for the self is 
at its heart. My security is ever dis- 
turbed by touches of transporting fear, 
[4^] 



IS HE AWARE OF SOCIETY 

my fears ever dissipated by heavenly 
insights. 

Ah, my Master, already I am 
stronger to see and to do because I 
have been with you and talked a little 
by the way! 



[43] 



VI 

What Does He Say of Himself 

WHY should I try to seek yoii 
above all others, my Mas- 
ter? Why do I take you as 
the test and valuation of my life and 
the life of the world? Why should I 
bare my heart to you? Behind all 
my soul's babble there is an unquiet 
wonder that gives rise to questions 
which show themselves uneasily like 
dark birds athwart a summer sky. I 
wish the heavens to be at peace, but 
these silent travelers bring news of 
storm. I cannot shut my eyes, nor 
can I close my ears. No monastic 
seclusion, no index of forbidden books, 
will keep down the momentous ques- 
tion, What are you, my Master? 

Are you simply the sum of every good 
memory, — the energetic dream of a 
final man, once visionary in the world 
of fact, but now a blessed fixture in the 
world* of ideality? Are you a good 
[44] 



WHAT DOES HE SAY OF HIMSELF 

man, the best man that ever lived, — 
or more, — or less? 

All ages have claimed you, I know, 
but was this due to your limits or to 
your largeness? I suspect that no 
generation espouses any man unless he 
has the marks of the day upon him, 
and to be marked may mean to be less 
than what is possible, to sign away, 
as it were, the potency of the undeter- 
mined. Or are you so far removed 
from the known and natural that you 
are another mystery to men, tantaliz- 
ing them, distressing them, parading 
in their clothes while needing no cloak 
for your greatness, professing to play 
the game as they play it, yet all the 
time with infinite powers to help you? 
Did you really not know that the fig- 
tree was fruitless? Did you need to 
learn as patiently as I? Were you 
actually tempted of Satan with no little 
door of flight into divinity left open? 
And was that cry of loneliness on the 
cross merely a cryptic utterance cal- 
culated beforehand to mystify, or was 
it pure escaping humanity? Are you 
man, man at the highest because 
also subject to the lowest, but victori- 
[45] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

ous; or are you God, the Deity, the 
Absolute to whom the words of these 
my colloquies are frightful irreverences, 
though my heart means them to be 
far other? 

Ah ! my Master, — you who have tor- 
tured the ages with the delicious prob- 
lem of personality, — who and what are 
you? 

I am aware that many of my fellows 
have made up their minds conclusively. 
They have built chantries and put you 
there forever, and then they have 
closed them, secure in mind, to go 
about the tasks of life in a steady, 
trampling way. Others have argued 
the case pro and con for generations, 
at last reaching some statement about 
you that left you merely a formula. 
Others have told me what you said you 
were, though often they knew not the 
slightest of rhetoric or figure, or the 
wealth of the Orient, or the fragmen- 
tary insights of the mystic mood. Some 
have pointed to what you did and how 
the very heavens were subject to you. 
Many have concerned themselves with 
how you came to be, prying with almost 
a prurient imagination into the least 
[46] 



WHAT DOES HE SAY OF HIMSELF 

significant moments of your life, impli- 
cating others in superhumanity, or 
else thrusting them into the region of 
shame. 

I cannot make up my mind thus con- 
clusively. I do not know what you are. 
I only know whx) you are. As I try to 
understand you I see you through the 
parable of myself, — the only parable 
that can answer with any security. 
And I do not know what / am. I do 
not know what personality is; and the 
greater the personality the less I know. 
I sometimes dare to hope that you do 
not know what you are, that God does 
not know what he is, that ever more 
and more divine surprises await him, 
await you, await me also as a seeker 
after you and a child of the Eternal 
One. 

Often, my Master, you seem to be 
careless yourself of all these searching 
questions of men. You never told them 
absolutely what you were; you always 
left something wanting. There is a 
noble carelessness about your attitude 
to yourself. And I am glad that you do 
not much concern yourself with these 
matters; for I feel in my heart that the 
[47] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

what always disturbs the who when it 
grows analytic. I would not question 
as much as I do about myself, — I 
would live more freely, objectively, 
simply — even as a little child. And 
you, my Master, often speak of your- 
self in the impersonal, objective, and 
eternal terms of childhood. Surely you 
are the eternal Son, — the eternal Child. 

Thus, though I may not know you, 
my Master, in substantive fashion, I 
can know you far better; for you spoke 
about the deepest part of any one of 
us, the intention. I may never know, 
even care to know what you are; but I 
can always know what you mean. 

I am sure you mean to be yourself, 
and not the creature of any sect or 
school. You are neither the preexist- 
ent Christ, the historical Christ, the 
experiential Christ, or any other Christ, 
— you are all and more. You do not 
intend to be cajoled into any system 
or caste. You are the sovereign and 
universal man. There are twelve hours 
in every one of your days, and the 
hour has not yet come for many of 
your labors. You stand equally un- 
moved amid the crowd or on the peak 
[48] 



WHAT DOES HE SAY OF HIMSELF 

of isolation. You keep your way bat- 
ing no jot of heart or hope. 

Ah! what an inspiration for me; for 
it is hard for one poor soul to with- 
stand the whole world. In the strength 
of your invitation to learn of you, and 
in the substance of personal experience, 
there are moments when I could face 
anything, do anything, be anything; 
for you have taught me your secret of 
sweet reasonableness and that other 
greater secret of the armed vision 
through which I see him who is invis- 
ible save to the inward eye. 

I am sure, too, that you mean some- 
thing in respect to me. I call you Mas- 
ter, Lord, Saviour, — all the dearest 
names of earth have been given you; 
for you loved men and love them now, 
and they must needs answer. I know 
you would love me and save me. I 
know that you lift me up out of the 
miry clay and release me from the mesh 
of passion and endow me with spiritual 
energy. I recognize the throb of your 
heart in mine; and in all history I 
perceive that you are cor cordium, 
heart of hearts, embosomed in the 
last sanctuary of life. Often and often 
[49] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

I am urged on beyond the prudential 
borders of life and I know you are 
there. Sometimes I mount to the seats 
of the mighty and I know you urged 
me on. Whatever I see, or feel, or 
know that makes life more sweet and 
solemn, and myself more pure, I am 
sure that you are in the midst of it all. 
What are you.^ Again I say I do not 
know; but you are my furthest vision, 
my truest heart, my deepest life, my 
Master. 

Still again I know something of your 
meaning about God. You did his will, 
you entered his love. These two things 
are enough. So you became a great 
force and energy both of detent and 
action, letting loose in the world the 
life of God. Men uninstructed by you 
felt the pressure of God's will and 
sought to interpret it all in one piece 
regardless of his love; or they presumed 
on his free grace and lived like beasts 
with lower pleasures and lower pains. 
You joined law and love; and the 
joining came through life. What are 
you.^ I do not know. Who are you.'^ 
You are the Life of the World. 

[50] 



VII 

Will He Show Me the Father 

AND now, my Master, I come 
to the last implication of your 
life. 
You never seem to be individual and 
separate. You have woven yourself into 
the strands of being. Existence seems 
to center itself in you. Behind your 
personal life, historic and recorded, 
there lie the spiritual backgrounds. 
You come trailing clouds of glory about 
you from the heaven which is your 
home. Below your daily ministries 
there surges the passion of the Infinite. 
You never speak from yourself; you 
never live by yourself; you are always 
reenforced by something beyond the 
dream of man. You have the golden 
deposit of utter spirituality. You speak 
of God the Father. Show him to me, 
I pray, my Master; for unless I find 
him I lose myself, and I am not abso- 
lutely sure of you. 

[51] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

I need to see him beyond a perad- 
venture; for many to-day affirm that 
he does not exist. These I see tramphng 
brutally forward, breaking down the 
defenses set about holy things by the 
piety of ages. Some say that you are 
a fiction of designing men, that the 
world is for him who can cow it, 
that the best philosophy is "a book 
of verses underneath the bough, a jug 
of wine," and some fleshly beauty to 
distract from serious thought. Men 
eat and drink, they post o'er land or 
ocean, and when the headlong pace is 
ended, and the hour of reckoning comes, 
they do not deem it moral requital so 
much as the blind buffeting of chance. 
Looking over life with a hard, worldly 
stare they say that God does not care 
for his own, for the seed of the good 
man often begs daily bread, while they 
themselves spread like green bay trees. 
Sometimes, my Master, in the sudden 
tumults of life, when I am tired and 
shaken, I too wonder whether God 
exists. Nay, do not condemn me, my 
Master! for this is the crucial question 
of the day. How can he exist and show 
himself so little.'^ Has not one great, 
[52] 



WILL HE SHOW ME THE FATHER 

tragic voice cried out, ''He does noth- 
ing"? Ah, I need your word to 
estabhsh me. When I hear you I am 
secure. Speak to me, my Master! 

At the other extreme men tell me 
that God exists too much, so that I am 
crowded into a prison cell in order that 
he may walk more freely in his great 
garden in the cool of the day. These 
do not call him God, they speak of him 
with veiled directness as force or energy, 
and they show by an overpowering 
multitude of ''facts" that God is busy 
doing so much, — too much, — that he 
has no time to care. They point to 
the star-fire and the slow evolutionary 
processes. They say that all life is 
struggle and labor, and that poppy- 
fields are as red with conquest as Nor- 
man battle-grounds. They tell me 
that I am inevitable in my coming, 
inevitable in my present being, and 
inevitable in my going hence. They 
live in geologic periods, think in evolu- 
tionary cycles, and write all things 
down in an epitaph — "It is ordained." 
Meanwhile, my Master, I am lost! I 
am overwhelmed by these billows of 
energy that go over me. Can the un- 
[531 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

moved mover of all this think of me? 
In the universal life I am less than an 
atom, less than a vagrant wish; surely 
the world Architect must needs forget 
me in the mighty procession of his 
plans. I am but the dust in the balance, 
or the mote dancing in the shaft of 
light that impales a cathedral window. 
God will forget me ! He seems to forget 
me in many a sore and travailing mo- 
ment. Does he, my Master.^ 

There are others who confuse me still 
more as they try to tell me about God, — 
more even than the strict naturalists 
who at least have a consistent scheme. 
These are the redundant naturalists 
who affirm that indeed God has not 
forgotten me. He remembers me alto- 
gether too well. He tipped the scale 
of being at my birth; he pushes and 
shoves circumstance every moment as a 
juggler throws balls, — if he did not thus 
endlessly play with me I should disap- 
pear. He invites, exhorts, rebukes, 
chastens, and even damns. He knows 
my private thought, my secret sin. 
And he will see that I do not escape. 
My Master, I cannot bear this peeping 
God of extreme supernaturalism. I 
[54] 



WILL HE SHOW ME THE FATHER 

wish to be let alone, save as I choose 
to be with God. I had rather be a 
creature of chance than be crushed 
with destiny. Sometimes in an agony 
of revolt against this irrational world 
I stand up and defy the hobgoblin that 
these men call God. Am I right, my 
Master.^ 

Nor do I get much warmth out of 
scholastic conceptions of God. They 
are too many, too diverse, and too sub- 
tle. Above all, they are too emasculate. 
I do not want a God of transcendence 
who sits far beyond the fever of life 
watching all creation with an impartial 
eye. I want love, I need leading, I 
must have light. Nor can I grow warm 
to a God who has deputed the gravest 
mysteries of life to a self-registering 
Church that turns out pardon with 
business exactitude and gives an in- 
crement of ''merit" for an outward 
observance. Sometimes, even, I am 
not satisfied with the immanent God 
who is offered to me to-day; for I do 
still wish to have some panoply of right- 
eousness, some enveloping action of 
love, to fall back upon beyond my- 
self as the final force with which to 
[55] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

overcome evil. Ah, my Master, were 
you theological? — are you now, in 
these academic senses? I think not. 
For your concepts stand, and they 
stand not because they are lapidary 
and rigid, but because they are human, 
religious, — and fluid. 

How different the God of your con- 
temporaries in the flesh, from what I 
dimly see to be your God! He was 
thought to be Exactitude and Parsi- 
mony combined, the ruler of a little 
province, with a depleted exchequer, 
who put on men the heartless tyrannies 
of the tax-gatherer. And how different 
God in his reality must be from the 
humanistic notions that are abroad 
to-day ! God has been made too human. 
This was the error of Greece with its 
''nodding" Jove, and its mythology 
that, spite of a parabolic glory, has 
some fearful addenda of shamelessness. 
It is the error of those who even now 
would worship the aboriginal instincts 
in themselves and call these by the 
transcendent name. Even when I 
walk the way of piety, and sit with 
contemplation as with a bride, and try 
in mystic schools to see God, I fail; for 
[56] 



WILL HE SHOW ME THE FATHER 

I cannot hold myself to be most divine 
when most irrational, nor can I think 
that God is waiting for men to swoon 
before he shows them the glory of his 
passing garments. 

My Master, you did not think of 
God as idle and absentee, — as irrevo- 
cable energy, — as chance, — as a tyrant 
postulate, — as an emasculate formula ! 
Was he not your Father? — and is he 
not mine? Did you not come to show 
him to men and to me? And if he is 
your Father and my Father, must I not 
see him through the nobler human emo- 
tions and intentions, — through yours? 
Then I shall see him as becoming, striv- 
ing, about to be, in greater and deeper 
ways than ever before. If your life was 
tragic, is not his? If you were willing 
to be given, did he not give? If you 
suffered, does not he? If he does not 
know the last agonies of human expe- 
rience, is he truly a God for me, and 
can he be a Father to me? 

When I ask these questions, my 
Master, I seem to touch the shores of 
mortality and make ready to voyage 
over an infinite sea. I am thrown far 
back in time, — so far that my mind 
[57] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

reels as I weakly spell the story of the 
eons; I plunge so deep that I can hardly 
recover. But however far back I go 
the final question always awaits me: 
Whence did evil come and what is its 
sinister meaning? Why did not God 
keep it out of the world? Is it neces- 
sary, and if so, is not its necessity a 
part of the nature of God? I console 
myself with thoughts of a later phase 
of life, when evil shall be seen to have 
ministered to good, and the salvation 
of man made more secure, and the 
glory of God made clearer; but I am 
pricked to the heart as I feel that evil 
is essentially a bad will. And how came 
bad wills in a world that is the sole 
creation of a will omnipotently good? 
Ah ! I do not know. I can only tread 
a hazardous way. But one dream com- 
forts me, — nay, more, gives me an 
exaltation of spirit that makes me sing 
together with the morning stars, — 
that my Father and your Father is 
struggling and striving too, and that 
when I struggle against evil I am then 
most Godlike and most a forwarder of 
God's unknown though not unguessed 
ends. You struggled, and you were 
[58] 



WILL HE SHOW ME THE FATHER 

the only begotten of the Father. I 
struggle, and I am one of the many 
begotten of the Father. Is it possible 
that the Father does not struggle too.^ 

And if he struggles, I am saved from 
sadness. For I do not struggle unless 
I have hope of victory, — a chance^ 
though it may be a bare one. Would 
the Father struggle if he did not have 
a chance of victory too? And is it not 
likely that to his infinite view the 
chance is changed to a certainty.'^ If 
as a struggler he is blind, or hopeless, 
or uncertain, he cannot be my Father; 
he would not be worthy even to be 
man's Son. 

No, the Father, though he struggles, 
is not blind, nor hopeless, nor uncertain. 
I discern spots of conquered territory, 
places where the desert blossoms, hearts 
that are full of joy. This goodly frame 
of the earth, with its myriad life and 
color, is one testimony of victory. The 
world of high imagination bequeathed 
to men is another. And the nobler 
structure of the related ideals of life 
that has grown out of the primeval 
slime into a true fastness for men's 
longings is still another. Above all, 
[59] 



IF I SHOULD MEET THE MASTER! 

my Master, the Father is your Father. 
He could not be your Father if he did 
not finally win. You won, my Master; 
and I cannot go far wTong when I posit 
you as the true answer to all my ques- 
tioning about the spiritual issues and 
returns of life. 



[60] 



AH! MY MASTER, — YOU 
WHO HAVE TORTURED 
IHE AGES WITH THE 
i)! LICIOUS PROBLEM OI 
F H A L 1 T Y . — W H O 

' WHAT A R ; 



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